Gallery 5
Cognitive AI Juice Bar
Lewis Doherty
Cognitive AI Juice Bar is an enquiry into the nature of human-computer interaction: from the benign to the more overtly disruptive elements of the tech industry. The often semi-abstract images and installations that make up the show look to force the viewer to question how they use technology and the language they use to account for it. In doing this, the work provokes us into a more creative yet quizzical interpretation of what we consider to be commonplace features of communication, labour or entertainment and asks that we consider our relationship to objects as we would our relationships to other people. The exhibitions takes its title from a Microsoft Azure activation that attempted to assign the ideal juice to conference delegates based on their reaction to a series of images.
Borrowing forms, concepts and materials from new media and digital culture and then channeling them through his own unique cosmology; Lewis Doherty creates enigmatic and often humorous modern allegories that make monuments out of that which is considered banal or superficial. Working across a wide variety of media, including sculpture, video, installation and illustration Lewis explores the tensions between the personal and the public, the illegitimate and the legitimate, the digital and the actual. Lewis has exhibited Australia-wide, including at Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Melbourne’s Nicholas Projects, Hobart’s Constance ARI, Firstdraft and Carriageworks in Sydney and twice at Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island. Lewis lives and works in Sydney.
